


entropy

by samarqand



Category: Marvel 616, X-Factor (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:08:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shatterstar wants the earth to be explicable.  Rictor knows better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	entropy

He had wanted love to be kind.

He surprises himself whenever he dreams, but those rare dreams are of dimensions only a membrane away, where he’s still raging on with burning arms and the deft movement of one who has never known anything but this physicality. He dreams of lifeless bodies flung across the stark stone to embrace him, and gristle under his nails. He dreams of things he has escaped, but he'd passed to this dimension with a weight on his shoulders. 

He understands possibility in its most gruesome iteration, even here in the city where X-Factor and Julio Richter take him in and grant him the freedom to finally love possibility. The mysteries, the possibility of mystery -- none of it begs his attention, nor does it throw itself at him. Here, it simply is. There waits some great, glaring complication, an eschatology in a new language.

Shatterstar grows addicted to the innocuous. 

That’s why in the morning he prefers Lucky Charms over Julio’s dull toast. Toast becomes so inexplicably soggy and limp. Lucky Charms paints the milk a soft plastic pastel. The rainbows turn pasty, with a crispy, dense middle that promises the rainbows will remain bowed and the horseshoes upturned to catch him some luck.

Longshot would be proud.

Shatterstar is pleased, as well, that he has settled swiftly into this cheerful routine. Happy breakfasts, then the advent of daytime television before Julio makes a miserable guttural noise or Monet repossesses the remote, flipping wisely away from trash TV. 

Quotations of the day from coffee table books that he commits to memory and dispenses, counting how many groans it earns.

And the horoscopes.

Today he decides he is a Sagittarius.

Night. When Julio asks him if he’d like to see fireflies, because they’ve wafted to X-Factor Investigations’ block, Shatterstar stretches his lips into his well-learned smile. 

The fireflies float on some personal tide, ebbing in and out in the dusk.

Julio’s smile is a white, broad curve in the shadows. 

Shatterstar thinks that in this moment, they have transcended trouble.

Julio reaches out and almost cups one, watches it blink off and on where it hovers between his palms; the glow shades his skin green.

“Ever seen them before?” Julio asks, breaking himself away from watching their silent trajectory.

“They’re like little ghosts,” Shatterstar says. ”No.”

“Ghosts,” Julio smiles again, like he likes that. ”Amazing, aren’t they? The color.”

“Some species of fireflies mimic the blinking patterns of courtship, luring suitors only to eat them,” Shatterstar tells him.

Half of Julio’s mouth twists in some fitful visceral response he picked up from Jamie. ”I know,” he grunts.

Not pleased. 

Shatterstar finds himself mimicking Julio.

“This is the stupidest,” and Julio suddenly sounds like he’s holding a grudge against himself. “Because -- sometimes there are facts, and I can know the facts fine, but the facts just don’t feel necessary. You know? I want to accept that there’s mystery in the world.”

“At this point, all the mystery’s at the bottom of the sea.” Shatterstar pauses. ”Not counting space.”

“God, but that’s not true,” Julio protests. ”Look at me! Look at — you. I can’t even figure _us_ out, how — “

“I know,” Shatterstar says blithely. ”Discovery Channel talks in absolutes like that to come off as relevant.”

“That’s very insightful of you,” Julio says. 

Shatterstar mulls this over. ”I can be.”

“So I’m finding.”

Julio drops his hands to his sides after a brief, quiet affection shines on his face. He looks lanky and vulnerable in his jeans and threadbare sweater. ”People like to dissect nature,” he murmurs. He seems on edge, ready to stop himself should he go too far, and yet. ”As though ecology were some basic fact. As though we could count on finding those perfect algorithms or — or, what, intelligent design, even, in nature. Unlock how everything works.”

Shatterstar thinks of incubation periods. How long it takes to grow a hand and an ideology, the mathematics that made him. ”It’s a good pastime,” he assesses. Sometimes it even serves as cold comfort, when he is optimistic: he was made with care.

“It’s bullshit,” Julio says, dully.

“I don’t think it’s bullshit to try figuring out what makes things tick,” Shatterstar reflects. ”If we understand, we can improve.”

“No,” Julio says. ”No. We never had a chance.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore,” Shatterstar confesses.

Julio’s face softens, and he opens his palm with half a heart to invite the fireflies in. ”People like to tell you there are answers you’ll find, if you look hard enough.” He breathes out through his nose, hard. ”But some things, you’ll never know.”

“Some things,” Shatterstar agrees. ”But not everything.”

Julio stops watching lights that have gone out. ”I wish I could walk on the grass right now, without shoes,” he says, a secret. ”You know? It’s one of those things that always made me feel alright.”

“I feel good when I read my horoscope and it tells me to hold my horses,” Shatterstar relates. ”Because I know I can stop worrying.”

“What do you worry about?”

“Mysteries.”

+

Learning to touch took time, and then he couldn’t get enough of it. This he understands simply about himself, with no quarrel: he can move to express, and press and urge in the right ways.

The truth is that Julio may love a good mystery because he knows something about the trees and their craggy ancient roots that others don't; because he feels something indeterminate when he presses his foot to the ground and the crust and the mantle rise to invite him. The earth, on which Shatterstar has never felt native, will move only for Julio.

They fuck, quickly and urgently, in the alleyway a block or two down from X-Factor Investigations, where it’s dirty and dim-lit and no one would care to look.

He presses Julio against the wall and lifts him, and Julio is almost giggling, a sort of breathless panicked “is this a thing we’re really doing here” sound that dies against Shatterstar’s hair when the first finger slips into him.

Then his legs lock around Shatterstar’s waist, and he swoons his head down with a sort of somnambulist's grace, and kisses him.

Tell him of anything dissected and plain that could make Shatterstar want to claim and want to run away. That could make him ache and make him afraid.

“I’m afraid of you,” Shatterstar says, turning his head to find Julio’s eyes.

He does. They open just as they’re beginning to slide shut. “What,” Julio looks down at him, some disappointed divine thing. ”That’s a really unsexy thing to say. You’re supposed to be good at this.”

“That’s true,” Shatterstar agrees. 

The truth of nature is there is no beauty on this planet he could make his own. Not this night with the fireflies bobbing dreamily out of sight, and Julio's hands on his and in his hair and on his belt, not Julio right here, keening when Shatterstar enters him and biting his lip furtively to hide this indescribable moment. It’s a mystery that it’s happened to him at all. This moment.

His mouth firm against Julio’s and Julio biting at him and rolling his hips down onto him, telling him to stay and to come and to move, only means something because Julio is there, interpreting. 

Heels against Shatterstar's thighs to drive him closer. A hand open against the nape of Shatterstar's neck. That near-smile on Julio's lips before he swims out of Shatterstar’s focus.

His feet go unsteady on the alien ground, arms grasping for life. Close enough to finally, finally breathe.

“Yes,” he pants, heat crawling along his spine and carving deep.

“Fuck,” Julio growls.

“I am,” Shatterstar says, grabbing him impossibly closer with needing hands.

Julio bats at his head with all the force distraction can muster, curling himself like a tight coil as he ruts down onto Shatterstar. His back slides coarse against the grimy brick walls. Julio commands, "Just -- ," and Shatterstar does.

He’s overtaken, Julio grinding to his thrusts with growing urgency, to the rhythm of alarms, yes, there it is, the inevitable mad rushing anguish, that’s it, that’s always been it —

Always undid Shatterstar. In spite of himself. Always.

+

It’s too late in the night. Julio is sleeping. Shatterstar watches TV with Layla. This time he learns about buffalo. He’d never known. Always had the idea in his mind, that these great-massed things roamed somewhere far away, always had the idea that they may be living just as he is, but hadn't known.

“Another mystery solved,” he says to himself.

There are just too many things. A frightening amount of things, absolutely innumerable things that may be and will be.

Just wait.

He thinks, briefly, of how he'd finished Julio off, stroking him and watching his face. How Julio was still flushed, his eyes gentle and mouth open and how they sat together there on the hard pavement, impossibly close, in spite of the cold and the darkness in the alleyway. The way his breath stuttered and he coaxed Shatterstar’s hand with his. The way Shatterstar pressed against him to feel.

Desperation.

His own.

Earth’s mechanisms terrify him. 

He thinks of Julio and he wants to run to him. Ask him things. Instead, he takes his leave of the TV quietly and slides into bed alongside the other, taking care not to wake him. Handsome Julio, in his tanktop with his unshaven face. 

There are so many things he wants to understand, so that he can stop them. Why the Earth makes, just to throw away. And makes again.


End file.
